How grateful I am
for all who have led me
through the fields of their hearts,
beneath the branches of their losses,
into the alleys of their wonder.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
from “We Are Told to Make Our Own Way”

•••

I cannot count the poets,
certainly not the poems,
that have led me through
the ravages of my own heart,
dropped breadcrumbs of hope,
beckoning with a crooked finger
down sweet-smelling paths and
rugged roads:

Follow me.

And I have, falling into lives that were
not my own, but felt, somehow, as if they
were—at least a little. Like diving into
a novel that plunges me into the deep end
of an existence that doesn’t exist,
except on paper, starting in a writer’s
mind and leaping into a reader’s.

Poetry sings in me, thrums me like
six strings and a good melody. For every
loss, poems have shown me the way
through, reminds me that there’s always
a way through, even when I can’t see it.

Poets built me into a poet, still learning,
forever reading and sighing, thinking,
I’d pay for that line, it’s so good,
some of them people I write with,
lucky me.

But they are my poets, as sure as Mary
and Dorianne, Billy and Marie, Maya and
Raymond, Lucille and Emily and Jane.
As Denise and Ellen and Kim and Naomi
are. As Galway is, and Mr. Merwin and
Danusha and Joy and John and Ada are.
As Rosemerry and Jack and James are.

I claim them as they claimed me
ages ago, embedded their poetic voices
in my cells, wound themselves into my
DNA, whispering words that fill me,
fuel me and follow me through the very
best and worst of times.

•••

(in honour of National Poetry Day in England)